Trulia is another top app for house hunting. With the Trulia app, in addition to viewing key details about a particular home, such as the price, square footage, number of bedrooms, and number of bathrooms, you can also learn more about the neighborhood where the home is located. The app offers 34 different neighborhood map overlays to give you important information about schools in the community, crime statistics, neighborhood safety features, commutes, shopping and dining, and more.
The Redfin app updates every five minutes to help make sure their users never miss out on a new listing. One of the most notable features of the Redfin app is the ability to take a video tour through a home using a local Redfin agent. This lets you get a good feel for whether the house looks like a good fit before you take time out of your day for an in-person tour. This app also offers multiple filters to narrow down a search and allows users to share their favorite homes with friends or family.
With the Homesnap app, you can connect with your real estate agent to share listings, ask questions, and find the right home to meet your needs. The app also allows users to create a customized search area and offers different layers to show property boundaries, satellite images of the area, and school zones. There are multiple filtering options when searching, with categories such as commute times, upcoming open houses, and school ratings.
If you have the money to hire a handyman for every household woe, go ahead. But if you want to hang on to your cash and exercise some self-sufficiency, check out these clever products that solve a million and one little problems around the house. Go now!
When buying a home, you and your family have a lot of decisions to make. Do we want one story or two? How far from work are we willing to live? Fixer upper or turnkey? Pool or no pool? The list goes on.
Home additions can be hard to spot, but some common additions or signs of additions to look out for are converted garages, rooms with lower roof lines than the outside of the home, and guest houses that are freestanding.
Inspectors no matter the industry, have a lot of checklists to fill in. Whether you inspect houses, windmills or cars you walk around with an inspection checklist to get the job done!
You can add and remove items to this house hunting checklist template to make it right for you. For example, if you wanted to add in a field for jotting down how much the mortgage payment or mortgage rates would be, you could do so. Or if you need to take note that you'd need to order paint in order to give a home an update or makeover, you could add a notes section for that. You can also customize it to include the features you are looking for in a home and simply check them off as you view each home. This will help you to better compare which house had more of the amenities you were looking for.
Use this home buying checklist as a cheat sheet for your entire home buying process: from gathering your documents to applying for a mortgage and finding your dream home. We explain each stage of the process in detail below.
FHA loans require 3.5% down, and some types of loans allow you to buy a house with no down payment at all. Government-backed USDA and VA loans let you finance 100% of the home price with no money down.
This checklist below was originally created by HUD, and it does a good job of reminding you to pay attention to the same details for each house you see. As you complete the forms and see more houses, you and your agent should quickly learn what areas and home types are better fits.
Use one for each house you tour, and match it up with any pictures you take. Alternatively, there are several house-shopping apps that allow you to integrate your notes and pics into online files. For every criterion, note if the home feature is a good, average or poor fit for you.
A good house-hunting checklist helps you keep track of each home you look at so you can match up the features of the home with your housing needs and wants. However, a great house hunting checklist includes items that could make the difference between getting the home you want or missing out because another buyer was better prepared.
Communication skills. The homebuying process involves lots of legal and real estate terms, with strict deadlines that must be met along the way. Set expectations for how you want to be contacted (text, phone call, email, etc.), how often you want to be updated from the beginning of the process and hold your agent to those standards.
Before heading to your favorite real estate website, prepare yourself and estimate your budget. This amount can be estimated by comparing the amount of money you (and others in your household) earn after taxes to your average monthly expenses and debt.
Using both your budget and your estimated loan payment, you have can now hunt for houses by calculating and comparing monthly mortgage payments. Use our Mortgage Calculator to compare monthly payments on your desired properties. And, feel free to use our other mortgage resources throughout your house hunting experience to help you stay on the right track.
Once you start working with a licensed real estate agent, discuss your wants, needs and concerns. If you have followed this home-buying checklist, then your budget, neighborhood, amenities and desired style or structure should already be laid out so that your real estate agent knows exactly what you need.
Real estate listings are online, on social media and on mobile apps, so you can do the initial search yourself. But know that your agent gets listings before they hit the popular home buying sites, and that some key information about homes may only be available to agents.
A good realtor will guide you through the process but consider the history of the property when formulating your questions. Gather as much information as possible. Consider when the property was built, the materials used, any renovations made and whether licensed professionals made them. Answers to these types of questions could lead to costs you will need to factor into your budget, including immediate fixes and those for the future. Knowing these answers will help you determine what you can truly afford. Below is a partial list of questions you might consider as you begin our house-hunting experience.
About to become a homeowner? Currently house hunting? There are plenty of house buying apps available now that can make finding and personalising your first home easier. Here are some of the best for first-time buyers.
The Air Measure app turns a smartphone into an augmented reality-powered tape measure. With additional tools including a floor plan tool, spirit level and stud finder this is a handy app to help with those DIY projects in your new house.
Buying a home is a big deal and the home buying process can get overwhelming fast. You might choose to explore different types of home loans and weigh the options between a fixer upper house or a ready-to-move-in home.
This is one of the most important steps in any home buying checklist. Home inspectors play a crucial role in identifying damage or hazards in a home. A good home inspector is very thorough and checks HVAC systems, windows, basement walls and floors, crawl spaces, duct work and much more. However, they do not check everything. According to Realtor.com, these are six common areas home inspectors will not check:
To make sure everything goes as smooth as possible, review and complete each item on the checklist below. The sooner you take care of each step, the faster your mortgage will be approved and the sooner you can move into the house you want.
When buying a house, you'll look at a variety of different homes, and it can be tough to keep straight in your head which properties made what impression. That's why we've created a home buying checklist.
You will likely find out common misconceptions about how to buy a house, as well as buying trends in the Arizona housing market, throughout your homebuying process. If you're interested in how home loan interest rates affect your mortgage, we've got you covered there too. Our most comprehensive resource, Are You Buying A House In Arizona? eBook is available for free viewing or download as well.
A real estate agent will be with you every step during the home buying process and will offer expert knowledge of the local housing market. They can advise on whether a home is listed at a fair asking price, what to make of the home inspection, assist in the negotiation process, and explain the paperwork involved in the closing process.
Once you have selected a lender you want to use and before you start looking at homes, get a mortgage pre-approval. A pre-approval includes a maximum loan amount and puts the agent in a position to negotiate with confidence on your behalf. It also strengthens your offer to the seller because a bank is already willing to lend you the money, improving the likelihood of closing the sale. This is an essential step in the home buying checklist.
Once you have zeroed in on a neighborhood or area you like, figure out what the perfect home for you looks like. Do you love Mid-Century Modern-style houses or prefer Victorian-style houses? Are you looking for a single-family home or a condo? Front porch or back deck? The options are endless.
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